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New voting restrictions in Texas so tight they result in former House Speaker's request for voter ID card to be rejected.

Courtesy of USA Today:

Just how tough are new voter identification requirements in Texas? Apparently tough enough that former U.S. House speaker Jim Wright reportedly was denied a voter ID card on Saturday.

"Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn't give me an ID," Wright, a Democrat who resigned from Congress in 1989, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in a story about his experience at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.

The 90-year-old told the newspaper he realized last week that he didn't have a valid ID to vote in Tuesday's elections. He was refused a voter ID card because his driver's license expired in 2010 and his faculty identification from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he teaches, doesn't meet requirements under the state law enacted in 2011.

Well look at that, in their attempt to reduce the number of voters for Wendy Davis they have stopped an elderly white guy as well.

They disenfranchise enough to THEM and it will be the republicans who will find their voter ranks trimmed down to the bone.

And by the way this is, once again, a solution without a legitimate problem.

This from Politifact who looked into voter fraud in Texas:

Abbott spokeswoman Lauren Bean emailed us records showing that from August 2002 through September 2012, the office received 616 allegations of election-code violations and recorded 78 election-code prosecutions.

By our count, 46 of the prosecutions ended with a conviction, guilty plea, no-contest plea or guilty plea as part of deferred adjudication. Of those, 18 cases appeared to involve fraud committed by individual voters: 12 cases with ineligible voters, five cases of voter impersonation and one case of voting more than once.

So, by our reading of the attorney general’s records, 18 instances of voter fraud have been confirmed in Texas since 2002.

18 instances of somebody voting using somebody else's name in ten years.

And THAT was enough of a reason to disenfranchise thousands of potential voters, and one former Speaker of the House?



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